Buckle up, because this year we have an extraordinary lineup of speakers.

Sandi is a programmer, and the author of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR) and 99 Bottles of OOP. She believes in simple code and straightforward explanations and wants to help you transform your code and bring back the joy.

Jessica Rudder is a web developer with a passion for clean code and the Kansas City Royals. She once ran 70 miles through the Santa Monica Mountains “just for fun”. When she’s not writing code, she can be found running aimlessly through city streets training for her next ultra or creating code-related videos on YouTube for CompChomp. She is an avid squirrel photographer and loves the color green.

John Feminella is an avid technologist, occasional public speaker, and curiosity advocate. He serves as an advisor to Pivotal, where he works on helping enterprises transform the way they write, operate, and deploy software. He’s also the cofounder of a tiny analytics monitoring and reporting startup named UpHex. John lives in Charlottesville, VA and likes meta-jokes, milkshakes, and referring to himself in the third person in speaker bios.

Life has been a journey from shipping “The Conversation”, an attempt at improving the standard of journalism which now has editions in 7 countries and read by millions of people. Next was shipping the world’s first Ruby on Rails powered banking platform which recently won best banking platform in Australia. Now building an entirely new banking experience aiming to be a genuine alternative from current banks - Up. I still enjoy making time to work on the important things… you know… like Mario Kart.

Lauren is a Senior Full Stack Engineer at Netflix. Previously, she was Senior Developer at DockYard, a user experience driven software consultancy based in Boston, MA. Although formally educated in Finance, she has been involved with user interface and experience design for more than 5 years. She is also an active contributor to the Ember.js community, and a regular speaker at leading JavaScript and Elixir events & conferences.

Danielle is a full-stack software engineer working at Blue Apron in New York City on their warehouse software. Her expertise stretches between front-end heavy web applications and a variety of back-ends. She has been coding since age 12. In her free time, she enjoys live music, food, teaching others to code, and hanging out with her cat.

Tom is a ruby developer at Disco who has recently fled from London to settle in Melbourne. Alongside programming, he is interested by the mind, our cognitive biases and how these effect the way that we interact with each other.

After many years translating Ancient Greek texts and working with antiquities, Eleanor began tinkering with code — now she writes Ruby instead of reading Homer. When she’s not digging into code at The Conversation, she’s probably cooking, attending a yoga class, or patting other people's dogs at the park.

I’ve been mentoring developers for close to a decade. I’ve done this through lots and lots of pairing, book writing, my addiction to Stack Overflow, and plenty more. More recently, I’ve started up a Junior Engineering Program at Culture Amp where I’m growing 8 engineers into the confident and capable engineers of the future through a structured program.

I am a developer, designer, and community organiser. I started Ruby New Zealand, Kiwi Ruby, and Rails Girls in Wellington, New Zealand. I like haiku, spreadsheets, and seeing fluffy dogs in the middle distance.

Katie has worn many different hats over the years. She has been a software developer for many languages, systems administrator for multiple operating systems, and speaker on many different topics. When she’s not changing the world, she enjoys making tapestries, cooking, and seeing just how well various application stacks handle emoji.

Zach Holman is a developer living in San Francisco. He joined GitHub in 2010 as one of their first engineering hires, and helped build and grow their product and culture over five years. Currently he’s the founder and CEO of During, a new calendar to help you during your day. He also advises startups, including GitLab, StackShare, and Dockbit.

Stella Cotton is a Tools engineer at Heroku and co-founder of AndConf and Fog City Ruby. She loves good abstractions and boring technology.

Human for over 30 years, a developer for 8 years, language polyamorist (but Ruby will always be my first ❤️). I care a lot about the Ruby community, and believe in clear and fun communication. Life's too short for: bad coffee, poor music, and white melamine.

Alaina is a software engineer at Medium, where she works predominantly on iOS development and petting other people’s dogs. She recently graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in computer science and many humanities classes under her belt. Though she’d like to think that her claim to fame is her inability to pronounce the word “corgi,” she’s best known for her technical writing in freeCodeCamp and Chronicles of a Junior Dev, as well as for co-founding BuildHer, Chicago’s first-ever student-run women’s hackathon. Current fascinations include swing dancing and reading fiction.

Paolo Perrotta is the author of “Metaprogramming Ruby”. He has almost twenty years of experience as a developer, ranging from embedded to enterprise software, computer games, and web applications. He’s now focusing on AI, and writing a book on Deep Learning for the Pragmatic Programmers.

The granddaughter of a former MIT computer (yup, that was a job title), Amy was clearly supposed to be a programmer, but just did not get the message. Her wanderings have taken her through the land of libraries and archives and into software consulting. Now a software engineer at Heroku, she is deeply grateful for every scarce day she does not use vim commands in Google Docs.

Ken is a Melbourne-based software developer, whose job is to promote and guide good software practice at REA Group. He is an outspoken advocate of functional programming, runs a weekly "FP Guild" at REA, and is co-organiser of the Melbourne Scala User Group and Compose :: Melbourne FP Conference.